Hipshakers Vol. 2 - Scratch That Itch

(Vampi Soul) This boss biscuit features 20 mostly danceable tracks from the King/Federal catalogue, almost all from the 60s, (an exception being the 1956 burner "Buggy Ride" by pre-Dolemite Rudy Ray Moore). The lineup includes some big names (Willie Dixon, Hank Ballard, Freddy [pre-Freddie] King, and Amos Milburn), though with the exception of Otis Redding doing his legendary "Shout Bamalama," they're doing some pretty obscure numbers that I've never seen on comps. Granted, Eddie Kirk isn't doing the best monkey song, Freddy King's not doing the best Watusi (though he sure can wail on guitar), and "Scratch that Itch" is a pretty generic dance number. But the bands and the singers (especially the chip on her shoulder shouter Carol Ford and the whistling Titus Turner) elevate middle of the pack stuff to joyful jukebox music by sheer will and skill. This is a fun relic of an era when the jump/R&B/orchestra cats who were playing rock 'n' roll before there was rock 'n' roll were still working and didn't have it in them to successfully copy crossover stuff.

nrbq "Keep the Love Goin'"

(Clang) Although the lineup they had from the 70s thorough the 90s wasn't the actual original late 60s lineup, I always saw NRBQ as an act like the Four Tops or the Dells, where the chemistry and truth of the classic lineup was one of the most magical elements. Unfortunately, when Tops stopped spinning on this mortal coil at first it was cool when they went on as a trio, but it just started to sound wrong and bad as original voices were absent or replaced. I don't think the Dells have performed since Johnny Carter's death, which makes sense. But there's no doom to report about the new phase of NRBQ. The great, great, great news to report  is that they are excellent and are making fantastic music. Why shouldn't they? Terry Adams has been playing with the fine Terry Adams Quartet for years and though some may bristle at the recent name change from TAQ to NRBQ, I applaud this. Terry Adams can buy three goldfish and tour as NRBQ and if you refuse to see the show you are going to miss some primo entertainment, cuz Adams knows how to move a crowd. Chicagoans will be a bit biased about the new band because local boy made good Scott Ligon is exerting his influence on this Newer Rhythm Blues Quartet, and anyone who watched him tear up local stages for years can hear his writing, style, and chops driving this great CD. In fact, on the hot opener (a tribute to Boozoo Chavis) you can even hear Adams picking up a few musical tricks from Scott's brother Chris (Adams recently put out a Chris Ligon retrospective CD). But the best thing about this CD is that it's timeless and fun, which is the argument I've often heard about why NRBQ belong in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Adams and his co-horts, old and new, have always tapped into something that makes their music never sound dated and never sound dull. I hope Terry Adams VIII is leading NRBQ in the year 3010!

Churchwood

(Saustex) Here's some things about the white boy blues: the zillionaire practitioners, your Stones and your Zeppelins, seemed to exoticize and condescend the African American bluesmen that begat their artform..all the way to the bank. Then you've got the more reverent students, the Jewboys in Chicago in the 60s, your Bloomfields, Butterfields,  Corky Siegels, paying respect and limiting their own ambitions. Then you've got the kid prodigies turned hacks like Johnny Lang, who you can't blame for seeing Buddy Guy as a cartoon character -- the Papa Smurf who anointed them, hell they were 8 when they started, what did they know? But then you've got the crazy motherfuckers that you really can't even figure out what race, class, logic, soul, or sanity have to do with anything. Little Howling Wolf playing his noseflute on Chicago street corners, a hundred Hasil-inspired wild-eyed one man bands, Captain Beefheart zonking us with his Doo Wah Diddys, schizo Peter Green foregoing Fleetwood Mac success to jam the blues...these are the kooks that midwifed Churchwood's gruff, threatening, slightly bizarre, and 110% badass noisemaking. This is no minstrel show, these Texans are bloozin' it up because they got something smart and ugly to say and they need to express it as simply and pretty as they can, and that's where the blues comes in. That they seem quite possibly out of their gourd nuts doesn't hurt!

Mike Bloom "King of Circles"

(Little Record Company) He's no Mike Bloomfield bluesically and no Mike Bloomberg legislatively, but when this haunting multi-instrumentalist singer songwriter gets on the mic you feel it on your bloomers!

Mama Rosin Together with Hipbone Slim & the Kneetremblers

(Voodoo Rhythm) Wild English bluesabilly meets spooky Swiss Cajun combo and the results are greater than the sun of their parts, yielding low-key, high impact, sublime strangeness. These Europeans don't so much fetishize American rural music as they do practice it as a religion, and this is their authentic, sincere gospel music. Their squeezebox/shuffle version of "California Sun" (or "Louisiana Sun," as it's re-named here) sounds like a million Euros!

The Pussywarmers "The Chronicles of..."

(Voodoo Rhythm) Apparently if you are a Swiss anachronistic jazz orchestra playing a faithful, non-ironic melange of Dixieland/German drinking songs/1930s roller rink organ music/Brecht mutations/oompah/Cab Calloway tribute/French seduction ballad/Tango/warped rural Lomax recording music it somehow sounds like psychedelic punk without even trying!

La Peste DVD

(La Peste) As the music industry morphs, CD sales die, and nobody knows what to do next, it's exciting to see people trying something differently. La Peste was a mid-70s Boston punk band who had a collectible spooky, 3-chord single ("Better Off Dead"/"Black") and who already have had a couple of retrospective compilations released (on Matador and Dionysus). But this release feels like it's trying to not so much re-package material as reinvent the package. If this was just an archival concert released on DVD it would be cool, but this is a concert that was shot eerily well by Jan Crocker (the incredible crowd dancing shots look like they were from a punk rock Soul Train) and the post production is so intense (the sound seems like studio recordings dubbed in/the editing implies more cameras were present than at any 70s punk club gig ever) that this feels like a fresh angle on presenting a band's entire catalogue in the post-music industry era. There are videos in addition to the already music video-ish concert and there is a gallery of images with more audio. And most of all there is some excellent punk rock music captured here in a way that may seem more stilted than punk should be (due to the equivalent of high production values -- I'm sure there was no budget, but the talent of the documentarians makes up for it) but nonetheless captures this magic moment when punk bands weren't sure what punk meant and mixing up awkward lifts from Britain, art rock, garage rock, and melody was fine by every dancing fool in that audience.

The Electric Chair DVD

(MVD) In this strange, beautifully shot oddball of a movie a painfully unfunny aging Jewish would-be comic finds himself  in a weird dive club, populated by cryptic characters (including a praying hassid and a man forcibly ejected for laughing) where he shares the stage with a rimshotting drummer and an electric chair. As his hack one liners morph into the kind of dire, ugly truthtelling that Lenny Bruce thought he was doing the crowd remains stonefaced but the death seat becomes more and more appealing to the sad clown. Obviously adapted from a theater piece (a one man show, I'd venture) this doesn't suffer from the stagey awkwardness that plagues other screen adaptations like Short Eyes, because this dialogue is all supposed to awkward and stilted. Victor Argo is pretty amazing in the lead, and this lost mid-80s black and white art film is really worth watching.

Alive! Is Michael Jackson Really Dead?

(Elbow Grease) This DVD is so great! Not because the content or the research into  a Michael Jackson death hoax is compelling or original -- the bulk of this involves taking stuff from mainstream internet sites and the TMZ TV show. This is great because of the personality of the host, an excited woman named Pearl Jr., a self-described "Michael Jacksonologist." 90% of the video is simply voiceover while clips from TV or images culled from the web illustrate a hodgepodge of disconnected MJ fake death theories, several of which make Paul is Dead conspiracy stuff seem sensible. In choreography seen in the This Is It concert film Jackson has added a move where he points down, indicating that he will be in the ground soon. Numerous cryptic domain names were registered just after Michael's death. On the Forest Lawn website (note that Elvis, who also may have faked his death, was buried in a different cemetery that was also named Forest Lawn) if you type in 'Michael Jackson' it won't tell you where his grave is. All this is set against a repeating loop of scary music. But through all the ominous audio Ms. Jr. never loses her smile. What makes this video  a delight is watching how excited and happy Pearl Jr. is to present even the most modest discovery, to present anything, to just be engaged. Her enthusiasm is unbridled and infectious. As she histrionically punctuates things with "hmmm...," "How is it really possible...," and "well I'm here to tell you...," you totally root for her. TMZ would be ten times better if they fired all the jaded, smarmy hipsters and just went with someone as excited by the work as Pearl Jr.. One theory she presents is that the death must be fake because the surviving Jacksons act so weird (meaning they've been faking deaths for 40 years), and they smile too much for a grieving family. But Pearl Jr. never loses her broad, charming grin no matter how much death and misery she describes, and I would say that unlike some distraught Jackson obsessives, she is not particularly invested emotionally, but rather is recreating a gossipy discussion in a beauty shop where everyone instantly takes an opinion and shakes heads and makes declarations even if they haven't thought it out or don't care that much: it's just a form of fun discourse to pass time and it's actually more enjoyable to watch then dense, kooky, paranoid, hard to fathom conspiracy nut research. She really should have her own show, spending fifteen minutes online researching Bigfoot or Charlie Sheen or Obama's birth certificate and then buoyantly expounding on it for an hour. That's something I'd watch.

Young Islands DVD

(Gulcher) What I hate about every one of the "mumblecore" films that I've seen is that despite being no budget/underground-ish they almost always seem to just be a cheap version of something commercial, with the humor being hackish and the sex or edge or youth-element being manipulatively titillating.  Director/writer Kevin Chenault's Young Islands is a film following a kid who seems relatively OK, other than the bedwetting, glue huffing, bi-curiosity, a hooker hook up, a crumbling family, and an ass kicking. Despite all the action of the previous sentence what makes this film legit is how mundane and straightforward it presents shitty, small town life. The semi-pro acting, the evocative black and white photogrpahy, and the soundtrack (in which poignant ambient sound is occasionally jarred by Gulcher slipping in some Gizmos action) should be a model about how to approach independent, underground, non-commercial film. And how to huff glue.